OSNews

The PS3 is unsuitable as a cluster node for the same reason that the XBox and the PS2 are - lack of RAM and I/O.

The XBox runs the same ~1GHz CPU as was standard issue in render farms of the day, but nobody used them, despite the fact they were price-competitive, because at that time a single frame video would typically use at least 256-512MB of RAM and a frame of a film would happily take at least 1GB-2GB of RAM and usually more.

An x86 PC with an identical CPU but with 2GB RAM would absolutely destroy an XBox for rendering performance, because the XBox was limited to 64MB of RAM (unless you were very handy with a soldering iron) and 100Mbps ethernet.

And the PS3 has the same problem, relative to the hardware used for cluster nodes these days.

Really, show me someone using actual consumer PS3s to do real work, and i'll believe you, but your Terrasoft example isn't that. They are using the 2U beta PS3 units given to developers long before consumer hardware was available.

They are most certainly not building consumer PS3s into the production cluster - unless, and this is a stretch - they have used Sonys proprietary game dev kits to use PS3s as visualisation processors for the system - precisely the capability that this Linux offering deprives developers of. I doubt this is the case, however.

The simple truth remains that the PS3, like every other game console ever made, doesn't have enough RAM or I/O speed to make effective cluster nodes.

But thats why its a game console, optimised for graphics, and thats why not giving developers access to the graphics hardware, beyond a couple of very narrow avenues of research, is crippling it.